Drones Are The Future Of Women’s Health In Rural Africa

In late 2014, a group of public health experts and philanthropists were grappling with the problem of how to improve contraception access for women in the most remote, hard-to-reach villages in rural Africa, where a flood can shut down the roads for days and cut off medical supply chains. It occurred to them to borrow an idea from Amazon: Unmanned delivery drones.

“We thought, ‘Hang on a minute. We can use this for something else!'” said Kanyanta Sunkutu, a South African public health specialist with the United Nations Population Fund.

The idea grew into a successful pilot program called Project Last Mile, which has for months been successfully flying birth control, condoms and other medical supplies to rural areas of Ghana on 5-foot-wide drones.

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